Nucleation and growth processes of atmospheric aerosols and clouds

摘要

This project seeks to gain enhanced understanding of the rate of formation and growth of new particles and of cloud droplets as a function of pertinent controlling atmospheric variables, thereby permitting accurate representation of these processes in climate models. Aerosol size distributions are shaped by complex nucleation and growth and mixing processes that are difficult to represent in models, due to the need to accurately represent the evaporation/growth kinetics for each of the billions of discrete cluster sizes in the growth sequence, ranging from molecular clusters to particles of radius of several tenths of a micrometer or greater. A potentially very powerful means of solving this problem may be given by the method of moments (MOM), which tracks the time dependence of just the lower-order radial moments of the size distribution without requiring knowledge of the distribution itself.